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How nature writing can make us care

Tales of the natural world in three new books enthral and entertain. But is hard-won knowledge more compelling than the confessions of a nature lover?

By Stephanie Pain

Secretive predator&colon; wild goshawks are a very rare sight in the UK (Image&colon; Peter Cairns/Northshots)

NATURE writing is being touted as a new literary genre for new times. Most of us live in towns and cities but we are all keen naturalists now – at least by proxy. The more remote our physical relationship with the natural world, the greater our appetite to experience it through other eyes&colon; fed properly, even the most city-bound will reconnect with nature. That, at least, is the theory.

And there is a growing number of publications to meet this “demand”&colon; wilderness journals, species “biographies”, and year-in-the-life-of accounts of familiar animals – many of which prove more fascinating than we knew.

In this “new” nature writing, everything is close up and personal – and not just the wildlife. The beguiling lives of birds, butterflies and backyard bugs come with an obligatory foray into the life and thoughts of the author. An engaging bit of storytelling, some confidences shared, and we will be more inclined to nurture what is left of nature. Maybe.

Nature writing has always been popular. Gilbert White’s detailed observations of his surroundings in The Natural History of Selbourne have captivated readers for more than 200 years. Even sedate Victorians snapped up Alfred Russel Wallace‘s brilliant evocation of a more exotic world in The Malay Archipelago.

Generations of fine writers have conjured up for us wild places and astonishing creatures, but for every reader inspired to get closer to nature in some way, there are thousands who simply enjoy the read. Nature, as publishers and TV executives know, makes great entertainment.

So if we do want to inspire a deeper, more constructive relationship with nature, do we know how? For me, the key is to instil a sense of wonder. Fascination is a better spur than guilt, and hard-won knowledge more compelling than the confessions of a nature lover.

Among a clutch of new books, Ginkgo has all the right ingredients. It is one of those rare works written by a scholar whose passion for his subject makes you want to go out and hug a ginkgo – or at least seek one out to examine it more closely.

By rights, that should be impossible, says Peter Crane, an eminent palaeobotanist and former head of the UK’s Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. This singular species – a tree with no relatives, unique leaves, and extraordinary charisma – is a survivor from a prehistoric world.

Once ginkgo and its kin grew all over the world. But as the climate cooled 100 million years ago, they retreated until eventually a single species hung on in China, clinging to stream-side slopes. It is fitting, then, that a fossil expert tells the story of how this tenacious tree escaped the fate of its relatives, all known only from fossils.

Much is mysterious about ginkgo, but there’s no doubt why it survives today&colon; humans saved it. Around 1000 years ago, people discovered the tree’s many delights. They ate its vile-smelling nuts. They used it as a medicine. And they revered it for its beauty and longevity – its quality of “otherness” probably helped. Soon the tree became a fixture in temple gardens throughout Asia.

Today, ginkgo is resurgent, grown in gardens as an eye-catching specimen with an air of ancient mystery. Millions of ginkgos line city streets, the ultimate symbol of survival in the face of global change.

By contrast, city pigeons, it is probably safe to say, are more hated than loved. When Ken Livingstone became Mayor of London in 2000, one of his first moves was to try to rid Trafalgar Square of what he called “rats with wings”. The mayor of Venice followed suit, taking on the pigeons – and sellers of pigeon food – of Piazza San Marco, a place as famous for its birds as its historic buildings and exorbitantly priced cafes. Yet look up to the rooftops in many of the world’s great cities and you will find a league of pigeon lovers – men (almost without exception) who tend and fly pigeons from rooftop coops.

Colin Jerolmack almost certainly does not consider The Global Pigeon a study of nature. He is an ethnographer, more interested in the nature of culture. In this fascinating examination of people and their relationships with pigeons, he reveals much about our attitudes to animals, to each other and to the society we live in.

Like a good field biologist, Jerolmack spent years staking out his subjects and gathering observations. The difference is that his study sites are pigeon-infested city squares where lonely old folk feed the birds, pet shops that sell nothing but pigeons, and pigeon houses high above the streets.

Jerolmack kills time with old-time “fliers” in New York as they wait for their birds to come home. He sips coffee in Berlin with homesick Turks who see their birds as a link with home and the culture of their fathers. All the while, Jerolmack learns about the shifting shape of communities, the cultures that grow up around pigeon-keeping and about pigeon politics. Like ginkgo, pigeons survive because they thrive among people, but here it is the stories of the people who care for them that enthral.

Of the three new books, Conor Mark Jameson’s Looking for the Goshawk is perhaps the most in line with the new breed of nature writing, in that Jameson is as much a part of the story as the bird he is obsessed with. The goshawk is frustratingly elusive, so as Jameson travels hopefully from wood to forest and farther afield to New York and Berlin, he has plenty of time to examine our role in shaping the fortunes of this fearsome predator and to reflect on what that says about us.

Few people in the UK would recognise a goshawk because they are unlikely to have seen one. More than a century ago, they were trapped, shot and poisoned to extinction. Since the 1960s, goshawks have been quietly returning, thanks mainly to the escape of captive birds. Goshawks are spectacular predators with terrible talons, able to despatch crows, pigeons, buzzards and hares with a single slash. Despite their size and impressive weaponry, they keep out of sight. Often the only sign of their presence is a mound of feathers or pile of clean-picked bones.

Jameson works for the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and although he knows ornithologists who are acquainted with all the places goshawks are likely to inhabit, he rarely gets more than the odd glimpse.

The birds are far less secretive beyond the UK. In Berlin, goshawks breed in the city, and people seem happy to have them. But in the UK, the birds have reared many hundreds, even thousands, of young, and yet the population has not grown.

Some chicks have been shot in the nest. But most young simply disappear without trace – along with their leg rings. When other large birds die, some are usually found and their rings returned. In the case of the goshawk – zilch. The implication is clear&colon; goshawks are being killed and the killers are taking care to get rid of the evidence.

Goshawks are being killed and the killers are taking care to get rid of the evidence

Forty years ago, shooting and poisoning birds of prey was widespread, and the killing invariably blamed on old-time gamekeepers, men born and bred to view birds of prey as the enemy. Attitudes have changed, and some of the rarest species are making a comeback. But not the goshawk.

I assumed the urge to protect non-indigenous pheasants at the expense of this spectacular native bird had disappeared along with the old-time keepers. It seems I was wrong. Perhaps Jerolmack should apply his ethnographer’s eye to that.